" your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me,
neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as
to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or go without it,"
I put you on a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of
the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction,
with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.

3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably
be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either
exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at
least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a
unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed.
_Per contra_ the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique,
when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if
it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific
life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its
verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments
prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital
harm being done.

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions well
in mind.[55]

In some arguments the working out of the definitions of a few principal
terms may occupy much space. Matthew Arnold, a famous critic of the last
generation, wrote as an introduction to a volume of selections from
Wordsworth's poems an essay with the thesis that Wordsworth is, after
Shakespeare and Milton, the greatest poet who has written in English;
and to establish his point he laid down the definition that "poetry is
at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his
powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life--to the question,
How to live." To the development of this definition he gave several
pages, for the success of his main argument lay in inducing his readers
to accept it.

Many legal arguments are wholly concerned with establishing definitions,
especially in those cases which deal with statute law. The recent
decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Corporation
Tax cases and the Standard Oil Case are examples: in each of these what
was at issue was the exact meaning of the words used in certain statutes
passed